Apple now world's second-largest company

Apple is now the world's second-largest company, in terms of market value.

In after-hours trading on the US's tech-heavy NASDAQ market, Apple's share value hovered around $293 per share. At that level, Cupertino's market value comes in at over $267bn, surpassing the former number two, PetroChina, which is valued at a paltry $265.5bn.

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Almost exactly 13 years ago, when asked what he would do to fix the then-ailing Apple Computer, Michael Dell famously told a crowd of IT execs: "What would I do? I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders."

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

This video is a TV show made about the software Ivan Sutherland developed in his 1963 thesis at MIT's Lincoln Labs, "Sketchpad, A Man-Machine Graphical Communication System", described as one of the most influential computer programs ever written. This work was seminal in Human-Computer Interaction, Graphics and Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs), Computer Aided Design (CAD), and contraint/object-oriented programming. While watching this video, remember that the TX-2 computer (built circa 1958) on which the software ran was built from discrete transistors (not integrated circuits -it was room-sized) and contained just 64K of 36-bit words (~272k bytes).

Sunday, September 19, 2010

Stolen from a mail from Eric Smith on the ClassicCmp mailing list, here is the link to the 6502 hardware emulator. It's not fast, a few dozen of Hertz, but you can see what's happening at the die level by watching the color changes.

Thursday, September 16, 2010

"[...] I showed this to my friend Robert Swiecki who had written an exploit for the original bug in 2007, and he immediately said something along the lines of "well this is interesting". We pulled up his old exploit from 2007, and with a few minor modifications to the privilege escalation code, we had a root shell. [...]